No matter how proud or good of a student you are, always listen to your teacher (or in my case, chef). I remember the beginning of summer classes and debating whether or not to stay in my menu planning class because of all the outside work. I ended up staying in it because I figured there was no way it would really require THAT much time. hahaha, oh boy was I wrong! I've been working off and on this project ever since he gave it to us, but only really dived in about 2 weeks ago finalizing my menu and figuring out the costs of each ingredient used. Then over the last three days I have been nonstop working on detailing the menu according to our book, marking up the costs to get my selling cost, and finishing my twelve page business plan.
Having just completed the last step of this project (a short speech in which we "sell" our restaurant)--I feel complete relief. Yes, my pricing is probably off, but considering the limited time- I'm quite happy with my menu and concept. For my financial stability paragraph I put that my family used to live in Italy and we sold our land and moved to America to open a restaurant based on my grandmother's dying wishes (haha). I thought about going up for my speech and being like "yeeeeeeeah, I'm secretly rich. I'm funding myself." I figured that wouldn't go over too well....
Anyways, the top pictures are of items I've made lately in my baking class. This coming Wednesday is the last day for that class :-(. Anyways- Chef Easter has been out because he had a stroke, but a former student (Julie) and Chef O'Brien aretaking over for him. We've had a lot of fun making the above items as well as some not pictured. The left picture is of whole wheat loaf bread, white loaf bread, and my BABY (aka sourdough that I developed for seven days). The right picture is almond poppseed muffins & golden raisin currant scones.
In Garde Manger we attempted to make sausages (which I will never eat again). We did everything up to the grinding for the sausage before one of the teams managed to break both of our working grinders. Oh, and this was only after every other group had gone. So therefore, not knowing exactly when the blade edges wore off- we had to throw away all the sausage.....except ours! haha, that's what we get for being patient I suppose. So then we were using the big buffalo grinder and that worked but Chef Boetel managed to short that out right before we could case the meat. Needless to say, we went home early this day :-)
Food Prep 2 has changed since I last blogged. Chef Carey no longer instructs us (which is something I never thought I'd be sad to say). Instead, Chef Miller took over and we are doing demonstrations. This means that he'll give us a recipe the week before, he'll demo it the day of, and then we copy what he did and produce the same thing. Last week we had a delicious Sauteed Chicken with Supreme Sauce and Glazed Carrots. I received at 85/100 because he said it wasn't seasoned quite enough and that my chicken was a tad overcooked (my thermometer stopped working). Then this week we made Beef Stew rimmed with Whipped Potatoes. I received a 90/100 this time only both items needed more seasoning. I've decided I'm going to start arguing with him (advice from a book I'm reading) about his "complaints" on my food. I seasoned the heck out of that stew. It says a pinch and I "pinched" about ten times (no joke). So now, anytime we make something I'm going to season it to my liking and then add double. I wonder if there's something wrong with his taste buds....eating 85 different student's stews can do that to ya, right?
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